Leon Battista Alberti

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was an Italian scholar, writer and architect, born in Genoa to a Florentine family living in exile. He studied law at Bologna, took holy orders, and from 1431 worked at the papal court in Rome, later advising Pope Nicholas V on building. His On Painting (1435) set out the method of linear perspective for painters, and his De cifris (1467) described a cipher that switches between several alphabets, a method still called the Alberti cipher.

His treatise On the Art of Building (De re aedificatoria), completed about 1452 and printed in 1485, was modeled on Vitruvius. In his buildings Alberti applied ancient Roman forms to churches and houses. The facade of Palazzo Rucellai in Florence (1446-1451) has three tiers of pilasters, flat columns set into the wall, with a different order on each floor. At Santa Maria Novella in Florence (1448-1470) he completed a medieval church facade with a temple front and large scrolls that join the narrow upper story to the wide lower one.

The Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (1450-1460) wraps an older church in a new stone shell based on Roman triumphal arches. Sant'Andrea in Mantua, begun in 1472, repeats the triumphal arch on its facade and has a single barrel-vaulted nave lined with chapels in place of side aisles.